Exploring the "Alien" Movies and HR Giger. All entries are continuously edited and altered. Articles are published not by actual date.

Prometheus Q&A with Neville Page, Steve Messing and David Levy at Gnomon 8/17/12

A report published on AVPGalaxy by "Jenga" on August the 19th 2012 of what was said at the Q&A at Gnomon
School of Visual Effects in Hollywood. "Fangface" shared additional information. No audio recordings so far have made it onto the internet

Jenga: Last night I attended a packed standing room only Q&A at Gnomon
School of Visual Effects in Hollywood that was headlined by Neville
Page, Steve Messing and David Levy. All three speakers were gracious and
interesting hosts and were major parts of the concept team for
Prometheus. They had a lot to say and show in regards to their concept
art for the film and in regards to how some of those concepts evolved
over time. There were some highlights that stuck out in my mind,
particularly in regards to creature design since I am an aspiring
creature designer and artist myself. I thought some of you would like to
hear a recap:

David Levy, who was responsible for more of the
vehicle and set design showed artwork of his and Ben Proctor's that
depicted several revisions of the RT01 transport vehicle. One
interesting thing to note was that the concept they spent most of their
time developing was thrown out by Ridley at the last minute and a month
before the vehicle was to be created by the props team, he had David and
Ben sit down and completely redesign the vehicle in a marathon concept
session over the course of a single day.Steve Messing showed
his matte painting-style concept artwork where he helped to define the
look of the planet surface and landing sight by augmenting, painting and
compositing photographs of landscapes they picked from both Iceland and
Jordan. He confirmed what many of us observed in the "art of" books
that due to the earlier JS script being the guiding factor in the
beginning, they began by creating a world that was essentially LV-426.
These early landscapes were covered in the recognizable
smooth-yet-jagged spires and a dark cloudy atmosphere as seen in alienS.
After Scott changed his mind many times about what the planet should be
called (always an LV-some number) he finally settled on LV-223 and
decided he didn't want the more exotic spires or the cloudy atmosphere
and instead wanted the planet to feel like it had a massive scope and a
long viewing distance. He specifically chose to have a clearer looking
atmosphere with a giant snow capped mountain range that was several
times larger Mount Everest. The visual language of the ship
design was supposed to avoid a military or weaponized look. David Levy's
quote was that they were told to make it look like "National Geographic
with billions of dollars".Steve Messing showed a previously
seen early concept of the planet that shows a pyramid and crisscrossing
engineer structure with beams of light shooting up from all over the
planets surface. He said at one point the idea was that the audience was
only aware of the one base until they are all "turned on" and then we
see the beams of light shooting into the sky all over and realize there
are more bases. He said that this concept didn't feel like it belonged
in the universe and looked "too stargate-y". Later they decided to go
back to the Giger mounds instead of pyramids.Messing showed
the planet view from space that is the first shot in the movie and
explained that since he is multidisciplinary he painted, composited and
projected the image of the surface onto a sphere in Cinema 4D and then
re-lit it to create the final image. By doing this he ended up creating
that first shot all by himself.Messing showed artwork of the original more alien/aliens style planet
approach where the atmosphere was a mass of vortex clouds that were lit
up by a network of lightning strikes. He kept reinforcing the idea that
they started with something that was exactly like Alien and Aliens and
that Ridley wanted something that felt more realistic, clear and broad
in scope. This is why we ended up with a more earth like planet and
several establishing shots of the ship appear so small in the frame that
you can barely see it except for the telltale contrails it leaves in
the sky.Steve Messing's
Deacon design was always intended to be more of a placeholder but he was
excited that it ended up inspiring Ridley somewhat when he sat down to
design the actual creature later with Neil Scanlin studios. The hammerhead end and winged protrusion on the derelict/juggernaut ship
ended up inspiring Ridley Scott to suggest how they should design the
hammerpede. I find something amazing about this as it was essentially
the one other time that an original H.R. Giger design directly
influenced a creature design in this film and I find the hammerpede to
be the most successful original creature in this film.Neville
Page showed a lot of artwork that we have not seen before depicting the
early incarnations of the Fifield monster that was not used. There were
several quick Ridley Gram sketches that showed the creature lying all
curled up with it's legs under it almost like a goat or a fawn. As a
crew member approaches it, it was to stand up and uncurl to reveal
itself to be a long armed and legged semi-humanoid/alien hybrid similar
to the alternate Fifield we saw in the production artwork but slightly
more alien. Alien features included the elongated but fleshy head, that
contained eyes. Sometimes the eyes were above the surface and sometimes
below the surface of the skin depending on the version of the design. I
personally loved Ridley's sketches and found them to be better in
overall shape and proportion than the more finished artwork from the
creature designers. The Ridley Grams were, however, very very rough and
open to interpretation by the viewer in some instances. Neville
showed off several basic animation tests for the Fifield monster
standing up, unfurling and revealing itself. The movement of creature
was depicted by just morphing between several blend-shapes that he
sculpted in z-brush since he is not an actual animator. This version of
the creature had long (almost ape like in length) spindly arms that
ended in two fingers. Both the arms and the legs were triple jointed so
that they had an extra bend. The creature also had a small tail. The
elongated bulbous head was referred to as baby-like several times. The
creature was originally called the babyLater permutations of
the design were more Fifield and less baby/alien although all of them
had an elongated head. As he became more human in later versions they
started to play with the idea of having the facial tattoo still be
visible on the skin to show that it was the same person, just mutated.There
were test animations for running and jumping that Weta created. These
animations of the Fifield monster and the trilobyte/octopus creature
felt very much like something that usually never seen by the public due
to the rudimentary lighting and flat grey shading. It was exciting to
see these tests.All three designers spoke about the idea that
it is sad to spend so much time working on a creature that is completely
thrown out such as the Fifield monster but they understand it is about
what is best for the production and is not personal.Page
showed reference he has collected from google images and other places
that show real people with massive congenital deformities both at birth,
childhood and adulthood that cause encephalitis of the cranium,
enlarged limbs, massive tumors and growths and festering wounds as well.
They were horrifying because you really felt for the victims of this
terrible diseases. Neville made it a point that he never felt excited to
find a picture like this even if it was "great reference" because he
also felt for the people depicted. He said that Ridley especially was
deeply disturbed by the pictures of the babies and children with massive
deformities. His handling of the subject matter was very classy in my
opinion.A long detailed series of designs and rough animation
tests were shown for the Trilobyte/Octopus adult creature but they were
all subtle revisions on what was basically the final creature we got in
the movie. Some had many penis like appendages, and vagina like orifices
but all were very similar. This creature was his chance to "get my
Giger on" as he put it in his slideshow. He felt more freedom to try and
introduce sexually suggestive shapes in this creature. Save
for one or two quick sketches, Neville never had time to design on paper
and then reinterpret his work in zbrush. Instead he had to work
directly in zbrush due to the compressed schedule. He hinted that he
considers himself to be a traditional rather than digital artist so this
was not his most comfortable MO but he enjoyed working on this film
immensely and felt very honored as did the other artists to have the
opportunity.When I finally gathered the courage to ask I
question I knew exactly the topic I wanted to bring up: Where was Giger?
I asked the following run-on question (roughly verbatim): "Early on in
the production I recall hearing reports both from Giger's wife and
Ridley Scott himself that Giger was going to be personally involved in
some design work for the film. Now if we all promise not to go home and
write any gossip on the matter, can you guys answer, in a diplomatic
way, what ever happened to Giger's involvement?"There was an
expected awkward pause, then they sort of looked at each other and each
made small comments on the fact that apparently Giger did go and visit
the art team in London and drew some sketches that did inform the murals
(which they seemed to imply were the ones on the ceiling strangely
enough. I wonder if they meant the wall mural which was much more
giger-like, especially in the fact that it portrays parts of his older
paintings) They then summarized by saying that he was indeed more of a
consultant and that was it. Page in particular was sad because he was
working from LA and therefore never got to personally meet Giger who he
considers to be one of his heroes.All three hosts were wonderful
guests and charismatic speakers. David Levy particularly had us
laughing at several points during the show. After 2 1/2 to 3
excruciating hours standing in a hot dark room with these amazing
artists, the night was sadly over. I hope you enjoyed reading these bits
of info. I will try to add more if I remember any other good insights
they provided.(source AVPGalaxy)An additional note: Another major
character design point that they covered in the talk was the design of
the engineers. There were several concepts that Neville Page showed of
the earlier, more statuesque engineers. Interestingly they original had
breasts and were were sort of hermaphroditic. Neville did not like this
approach and was relieved when they did not pursue it in the film. He
did not show any of those designs. What he did show was that the design
was primarily derived from greco roman statue-esque style of the ideal
man. They also combined other examples of these same ideals that are
found in the face of the statue of liberty, Michaelangelo's David and
finally (and surprisingly) Elvis Presley's face. This actually became
pretty clear once he spelled it out for us because Elvis had this type
of romanesque nose, lips and profile. The skin started as essentially
living marble, then when human like with caucasian skin tones and
eventually to a more silicone or wax style white skin that we ended up
with. Interestingly Neville tried to both sell Ridley on the idea eyes
that were so far apart as to be inhuman and unsettling (which I loved
because it separated it from regular humans). He also tried to have a
skull that protruded in the back slightly but was only visible from
profile view. Finally he tried adding these sort of modern cyberpunk
style circular markings that signified sensor points where the
engineer's suit could physically connect to his skin. Eventually Ridley
steered Page back to a more traditional grecco-roman statuesque human
body.The 16 foot to 8 foot size issue was brought up and indeed
they confirmed that the engineers were shrunk down to make framing of
human and engineer sized characters in the same shot more natural as
well as to make their physical interactions much easier to stage and
pull off in camera. Finally, on the subject of the engineers,
Neville designed a series of tunics and samurai-like shorts for the
opening sacrifice sequence and thankfully they went with the one used in
the film that was more understated and less leather-fetish like. He was
a good sport when we all giggled at the leather-like designs. The basic
zbrush sketch of the suit that he ended up coming up with was another
last minute on one day type of design. It wasn't until that change at
the end that Ridley was inspired by Page's sketch to make the engineer's
under-suit biomechanical. (source AVPGalaxy)

Jenga: Hi guys, at the Prometheus Q&A last Friday in Hollywood with many of
the film's concept artists they showed the concept art and some renders
of the ship from the beginning of the film and although the fine
surface details are similar (in that there is a sort of dark metallic
surface with fine etched relief lines), the ship shape itself was not at
all like the juggernaut/derelict. It was in fact not a round disc
either as it appears in most shots. Scott called it "the petal" because
it is actually a more ovoid ship that is weighted and slightly stretched
in one direction so as to appear exactly like a rounded rose petal or
more spefically like a guitar pick. It is almost exactly this shape:

There
is also a smaller landing ship that disconnects from the petal and
deposits the group of engineers on the planet surface. The ship does not
belong to another race.
(source: AVPGalaxy.net)

Fangface: Yeah, if I remember correctly, there were different classes of Engineer
ships to be featured in that opening scene (with the elders getting out
and milling around, etc.). One ship had a guitar-like design to it.

However, Ridley & Co. felt it all looked too much like a Star Trek film, so they cut back on the ships and other Engineers. (source AVPGalaxy.net)

Fangface: I was also pretty curious as to how much the digital FX team would
divulge, but was very entertaining and blown away by the featured
designs.

I really liked the Engineer saucer ship, and was glad to
see a clearer view and different angles of that ship. It looked a lot
different than what was featured onscreen. I also liked some of the
other classes of Engineer ships he designed, but I understand them
wanting to veer away from it looking to "Star Trek-y."

I thought
I'd be most impressed with the creature designs, but I was really most
impressed with David Levy's set/vehicle designs. (source: AVPGalaxy.net)